HDG Hedges
Definition
Hedging expressions: maybe, sort of, kind of, perhaps, somewhat, etc.
Detection Rules
Default hedges rule (based on MFTE). Refines RB.
cql[word={words}]
cql[word="something"] [word="like"]
cql[word="at"] [word="about"]
cql[word="sort"] [word="of"]
cql[word="kinda|sorta"]
combine: p1 | p2 | p3 | p4 | p5
Word list (12 items)
mfte
MFTE hedges: simple word list, plus multi-word patterns. “something like” → HDG on “like”. “at about” → HDG on “about”. “sort/kind of” → HDG on “of”. “kinda/sorta” → HDG. “about/around” before numbers → HDG.
cql[word={words}]
cql[word="something"] [word="like"]
cql[word="at"] [word="about"]
cql[word="sort"] [word="of"]
cql[word="kinda|sorta"]
combine: p1 | p2 | p3 | p4 | p5
Word list (12 items)
pybiber
pybiber hedges: “maybe” (any tag) plus 5 multi-word patterns. All blob patterns use _\S* (any POS tag, not restricted to RB).
cql[word="maybe"]
cql[word="at"] [word="about"]
cql[word="something"] [word="like"]
cql[word="more"] [word="or"] [word="less"]
cql[word="sort"] [word="of"]
cql[word="kind"] [word="of"]
combine: p1 | p2 | p3 | p4 | p5 | p6
Normalization
Per words
Examples
Perhaps the road would be safer in daylight.
It was sort of an accident, or maybe a stroke of luck.
He was more or less convinced they should continue.
There seemed to be no sort of chance of getting out.
Source: le_foll_2024
I wish that kind of thing never happened.
Source: le_foll_2024
She’s maybe gonna do it.
Source: le_foll_2024
Non-examples
What sort of creature was it?
sort of = type of, not hedge — detector matches but wrong sense
Sources
- biber_1988 — Biber, Douglas (1988) : Variation across Speech and Writing
- mfte — Le Foll, Elen & Shakir, Muhammad (2023/2025) : Multi-Feature Tagger of English (MFTE) — Python version
- pybiber — Brown, David West & Reinhart, Alex (2026) : pybiber — Python package for linguistic feature extraction and Multi-Dimensional Analysis
- grieve_2023 — Grieve, Jack (2023) : Register variation explains stylometric authorship analysis